Emma Hayward is a 30-year-old sailor who splits her time between Rhode Island, an Antarctic research vessel, and living on a boat that she fixed up. (@emmastoryhayward)
Growing up on Cape Cod with parents who worked on boats, Emma never wanted an office job or predictable life—which is why she keeps building a life at sea, even as her friends settle down and start families.
Emma describes her journey from a “schooner bum” to a dirtbag rich captain and boat owner who works 3-4 months/year to cover her costs and accumulate savings. Crucial to this journey was securing a position on a 300-foot Antarctic research vessel, where she launches scientific gear as part of climate-related projects.
How do people make money with boats? Emma walks us through the options, from crewing fancy yachts (lucrative but not so purposeful) to charter day-trips (lucrative and somewhat purposeful) to outdoor education on tall ships (very purposeful but horribly paid). She touches on power and gender dynamics at sea, dealing with boredom and monotony, and the challenge of maintaining friendships and romantic partnership when spending so much time away.
Emma also tells the story of her gap year (and a half) when she sailed from Hawaii to San Diego with her dad, as well as a recent voyage from Rhode Island to Ireland that ended with a week of dodging container ships amid thick fog.
Full transcript: dirtbagrich.com/emma
Recorded in November 2024.
AI Notes
This is an AI-generated summary and transcript. Typos and mistakes exist!
Summary
The podcast features an interview with Emma Hayward, a 30-year-old sailor who has chosen an unconventional lifestyle. Emma spent her 30th year refitting her sailboat, working on a research vessel in Antarctica, and sailing across the Atlantic to Ireland. She lives part-time on her boat and in an apartment in Newport, Rhode Island. Emma’s lifestyle differs from her peers who are settling down, as she continues to pursue her passion for sailing and travel. Her background includes growing up on Cape Cod with parents who worked on boats, which influenced her career choice. Emma has worked various jobs in the sailing industry, including charter boats in Newport and educational tall ships. She recently secured a position as a marine technician on an Antarctic research vessel, which has provided more financial stability and benefits. Emma’s recent accomplishments include sailing her own boat from Newport to Ireland with friends, a challenging but rewarding experience. She plans to continue this lifestyle, balancing work on the Antarctic research vessel with personal sailing adventures in Europe. Emma acknowledges the challenges of maintaining relationships and a sense of community while living this nomadic lifestyle but finds it fulfilling and worthwhile.
Chapters
00:00:18 Emma’s Unconventional 30th Year
Emma Hayward spent her 30th year refitting her sailboat, working on a research vessel in Antarctica, and sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland. She currently lives part-time on her boat and in an apartment in Newport, Rhode Island.
00:03:45 Emma’s Background and Passion for Sailing
Emma grew up on Cape Cod with parents who worked professionally on boats. Her father’s sailing career and stories inspired her love for sailing. She knew early on that she didn’t want to work in an office and craved a lifestyle with unpredictability.
00:08:21 Making a Living Through Sailing
Emma describes various ways to make money in the sailing industry, including working on luxury yachts and charter boats in Newport. She mentions earning potential of hundreds of dollars a day, with specific examples of making $300-400 per day as a deckhand and up to $800 as a captain on smaller charter boats.
00:11:59 Challenges and Rewards of the Sailing Lifestyle
Emma discusses the challenges of the sailing industry, including potential exploitation due to the romanticized nature of the job. She emphasizes the importance of fair compensation for skilled work and the need to balance passion with practical considerations.
00:37:51 Emma’s Career Progression and Antarctic Research Work
Emma describes her career progression from working various sailing jobs to securing a position as a marine technician on an Antarctic research vessel. This job has provided more financial stability and career growth opportunities, allowing her to invest in her own boat and pursue personal sailing adventures.
00:43:15 Balancing Sailing Life with Relationships and Future Plans
Emma discusses the challenges of maintaining relationships while pursuing her sailing lifestyle. She mentions her efforts to stay connected with friends and family during her time at home and her plans to continue sailing and working on research vessels in the future.
00:49:31 Personal Sailing Adventure: Newport to Ireland
Emma recounts her recent trip sailing from Newport to Ireland with friends, fulfilling a long-held dream. She describes the challenges faced, including difficult weather conditions and fog, as well as the sense of accomplishment upon completing the journey.
Transcript
Blake Boles 00:00
Emma Hayward, welcome to Dirtbag Rich.
Emma Hayward 00:04
Thank you.
Blake Boles 00:06
You’re 30 years old. This is when most people take the cue to start thinking about settling down, getting a house, married, kids. How are you spending your 30th year on the earth?
Emma Hayward 00:18
Yeah, definitely not doing those things so much. This past year, I put the majority of my time into fixing up my sailboat, almost a total refit of that boat going over, like, everything on the boat and redoing it.
Emma Hayward 00:35
And then when I wasn’t doing that, I was down in Antarctica working on a research vessel, making money to put back into the boat. And then the third chunk of the year, I spent sailing the boat across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland.
Emma Hayward 00:51
So that’s kind of been the last year or so of my life.
Blake Boles 00:57
Okay, that is not the typical path. Do you live on this boat?
Emma Hayward 01:02
So I have lived on the boat in the past. Right now, I kind of live on the boat part time. Let’s see, in summer of 2021, I was living on the boat full time. She was on a mooring in Newport Harbor in Newport, Rhode Island.
Emma Hayward 01:17
After that summer, I hauled her out into a boatyard and started slowly chipping away at projects on her. And it was in the, let’s see, spring of 2023, I guess, that I moved into the apartment that I’m in now in Newport so that I could work on the boat, work here in town while I was working on the boat.
Emma Hayward 01:38
So right now I’m living in this apartment, but other times when I’m sailing her, I’m living on the boat.
Blake Boles 01:44
And your other friends who are around your age, are they all just like you, just traveling around the world, living on boats sometimes, sailing across oceans, is this just normal within your friend’s circle?
Emma Hayward 01:57
Um, I would say it’s not crazy, but I guess the extent that I’ve taken it to is a little wild. Um, when I first moved here to Newport, everyone I met was through work. I was working on sailboats. And so everyone would get into this routine where you would work all summer, work really hard, make a lot of money working on boats in town.
Emma Hayward 02:16
And then in the fall, everyone would kind of leave either on a boat gig that brought them down south to the Caribbean or just on their own travels with all the money they’d made that summer. Um, and then we’d come back in the spring and see each other again and do it all over again.
Emma Hayward 02:29
So it was like that with most of my friends for years. Um, but yeah, as I’ve gotten older and now in my thirties, um, even those boat friends are kind of starting to settle down, put down roots. A lot of them have bought homes or gotten married or starting to have kids.
Emma Hayward 02:43
So, um, yeah, it’s becoming lonely around here.
Blake Boles 02:49
Yeah. So what makes you different? Why keep pursuing this life as other people drop away and it becomes a bit lonelier?
Emma Hayward 03:00
Uh, let’s see. Um, gosh, so for as long as I can remember like wanting anything, I’d wanted to have my own boat and go sailing on it. Um, that’s just always been something it’s to me, it feels like time well spent and as I got older and started working like professionally on boats, I just loved it and, um, yeah, every, yeah, it just, it feels like a good way to spend your time, I guess.
Blake Boles 03:32
I wanna know more. I wanna know how you’re weird, Emma. I wanna know, like, what are the roots that led you to making all these little choices that took you farther and farther away from the norm?
Emma Hayward 03:45
Okay, well, let’s see. All right. I grew up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, in Orleans, for anyone who knows the Cape. And both my parents had worked professionally on boats. By the time I was born, my mom was no longer working on boats.
Emma Hayward 03:57
She was like on land, but my dad was still sailing professionally. So he would be gone for, gosh, I don’t know, probably like eight weeks at a time and then be back around for a few weeks and then gone again.
Emma Hayward 04:12
My whole life until, yeah, until I was probably 19 or 20 when he retired. But yeah, so I knew that working on boats was an option. So it didn’t really seem that crazy to me. Yeah, I knew that I didn’t want to work in an office.
Emma Hayward 04:29
That was something I knew very early on. And I knew I didn’t want to do a job where it was like the same. Well, I didn’t want to be able to look at a calendar like months in advance and know exactly what I was doing on a day months out.
Emma Hayward 04:43
Like I like that I don’t always know what I’m doing. I really like that.
Blake Boles 04:48
Mm-hmm.
Emma Hayward 04:50
Yeah, so as I’ve gotten older, and those friends that used to live more like me, something they always talk about is how now they kind of are craving more stability. And it’s just something, I mean, I’m definitely living a more stable life than maybe I was like a year or two ago, but I don’t crave any more stability than I already have.
Blake Boles 05:07
How did you know you didn’t want to work in an office or that you wanted this high level of novelty or even instability in your life? Did you have role models? Did you have positive or negative examples in that regard?
Emma Hayward 05:20
Uh, let’s say I definitely grew up like hearing all of my parents’ stories of, of sailing and just, yeah, what it was like to be offshore and to be sailing and, um, meeting their friends and just like seeing the relationships between these people and hearing about their lives and so, you know, as a kid, like it was just so fun to hear about.
Emma Hayward 05:41
And then I, I, I’ve always been a huge reader. Um, I read a lot of books by people living kind of this way, I guess, like, um, the Irvings and the Smeons. There’s all these famous people who lived on small boats and sailed around on small boats.
Emma Hayward 05:58
Um, so I just, I guess I knew that it was out there and that it was attainable. Oftentimes when I’m talking to people about how I live, it’s like, it’s hard for them. It’s like, I’m talking about living on another planet or something like it’s so beyond anything they’ve even thought about.
Emma Hayward 06:14
I guess, you know, the average person’s not going to think about living on a small boat out in the middle of the ocean. Um, but I guess I just always knew that it was something people did and I couldn’t stand not doing it too.
Blake Boles 06:27
What do people assume when you tell them briefly what you’re doing with your life? What do they think life is like for someone living on a small boat?
Emma Hayward 06:37
uh very I think they think that money is not an issue um which it is um but I think they think that’s you know money’s no question um and yeah a lot of times people don’t really know what to think but yeah I think they either think it’s you know it’s because money’s no issue or their immediate thing is like oh I could never do that I could never I could never live like that
Blake Boles 07:04
So Cape Cod is a place known for a certain accumulation of wealth. I imagine there’s some pretty nice boats out there. And as we’ll get to later, your, your dad did play a big role in your life and your development as a, as a sailor.
Blake Boles 07:20
Um, for the record, you know, is, is this life a kind of a rich kid life? Do you need to have money to be able to access this kind of lifestyle?
Emma Hayward 07:32
I would say that that would make it easier. I don’t come from any sort of, I mean, I do come from some privilege, but I didn’t grow up affluent. I don’t come from any generational wealth or like trust fund or anything like that.
Emma Hayward 07:44
I work really hard to be able to live the way that I live. It definitely would make it easier if I had a trust fund, but I don’t. So no, while money would definitely make this easier, it’s definitely not something you need a ton of to be able to scrape by and make it work.
Blake Boles 08:03
So you told me about your friends who are living in the same area and their seasonal pattern of, uh, working really hard in the summer, saving up money, going down someplace warmer in the winter. Um, how does one make a lot of money quickly working with boats?
Emma Hayward 08:21
That is the question. Here in Newport, there’s a handful of different ways to do that. Newport’s a really big center for yachts, like really fancy, crazy multi-million dollar yachts. We have a big shipyard here that they all come through to get work done on them.
Emma Hayward 08:39
And so a lot of people here who work on boats work on the yachts. It’s a really quick way you can make, it’s pretty good pay, you can make a lot of money. And additionally, you’re not paying to live anywhere because you’re living on the boat.
Emma Hayward 08:52
So it’s a great way to make money and not spend much money. The other big thing in Newport, which the scene that I’m more a part of is there’s these charter boats, they’re called head boats. They go out and do day sales in the summertime.
Emma Hayward 09:07
And depending on the boat, there’s all different shapes and sizes and kinds of these boats, but it’s definitely a grind. You’re going out on five to six trips a day, taking all these passengers out. You’re sailing in circles around the bay.
Emma Hayward 09:20
It’s really long days and it’s really hard work, but it’s really, really fun. It’s a great community of people and you make a lot of money in a pretty short season, probably like May to October. So yeah, you’re working all the time really hard, but come Halloween, you have a nice stack of cash in your bank account.
Blake Boles 09:43
And get a really nice costume. Can you give me an idea of how much money there is to be made either doing these day trips, these charter trips, or working on a fancy yacht? Like are we talking hundreds of dollars a day? More or less?
Emma Hayward 10:01
Oh yeah, more. I mean it depends on what you’re doing, but yeah, definitely like multiple hundreds of dollars a day. Um, let’s, I’ll try to think of like, what I, so, okay. When I first moved here, I was working as crew, just like a deckhand on one of these headboats.
Emma Hayward 10:18
It was the schooner. We would take out, um, we do five trips a day with about 57 passengers per trip. Um, trips are, we’re like an hour and a half long and it’s hard work. You’re sailing this boat. You’re talking about what the people are seeing.
Emma Hayward 10:34
Like it’s a lot of work. Um, but at the end of the day, I would be walking home with like, I don’t know, 300, 400 bucks in my pocket, plus like an hourly pay. It’s pretty good. Um, and then as I kept sailing and moved up and got, uh, I have a coast guard license, I’m a captain and, um, I work on a smaller charter boat that just takes out private charters, but it’ll be like a private group of up to six people.
Emma Hayward 10:59
Um, a two bucks and then whatever they tip me, which is usually around a hundred bucks. So I’ll do typically four trips a day. So, I mean, not everyone tips a hundred dollars, but if they do, I could walk out after a day with $800.
Blake Boles 11:13
So that’s close to a hundred dollars an hour and that sounds way more manageable than taking out 50 something people five times a day.
Emma Hayward 11:24
Yeah, I mean, it all just depends. There’s pros and cons to the smaller boats and the versus the bigger boats. When I’m on the small charter boat, I’m all alone, which is great, because you don’t have to split tips with anyone.
Emma Hayward 11:35
But it’s hard because it’s like, you know, it’s like a 12 hour day when you’re alone and you’re sailing the boat alone, which is take some skill and your unit does get lonely. On the big headboats, you have a crew that you’re working with, which is really, really fun.
Emma Hayward 11:49
But yeah, you’re splitting money and it’s yeah.
Blake Boles 11:53
What are some of the worst ways to make money with boats?
Emma Hayward 11:59
Well, okay, I will say, well, if okay, if money is what you’re after, there’s definitely ways you can work on boats and not make as much money. I, in the winters when I wasn’t working these charter boats in Newport, I would sometimes spend my winters working on more education-based tall ships, which is really cool because you get to sail in these great big historically accurate tall ships, and you’re working with students and you’re teaching them,
Emma Hayward 12:30
and it’s like really great experience. They notoriously don’t pay very much money, so you’re working really hard and not making a lot of money. Again, you’re living on board, so you’re not really spending much money either, but famously in the industry, people are like, oh, yeah, you can go sail around on this big old square rigger and you’ll make nothing, but it’s so much fun that people do it.
Emma Hayward 12:51
I did it, and it’s great. You kind of have to be able to afford to do that long-term though, I would say. I think something that often happens in the boat world is that people will try to get away with paying you less and kind of sell you on this experience thing.
Emma Hayward 13:10
That’s often how jobs will be pitched, is like, well, don’t you want to sail to South Pacific? Or like, don’t you want to sail to this place? This is an opportunity, which of course it is, but if you’re licensed and skilled, you deserve to be paid for those things.
Emma Hayward 13:25
So it’s always a question in this industry about letting your passion convince you that you could work for less is kind of a common theme.
Blake Boles 13:40
So because it has this romanticism to it, there are many ways to be exploited while working with boats because someone could make this argument. We’re going to go on this magical trip and of course, I mean, what are the power dynamics once you are out on, I’m thinking of longer trips now, not day trips, but when you’re out there and you’re working for someone else, you’re under the thumb of a captain who you may not know that well.
Blake Boles 14:06
I mean, what can happen out there if you decide, oh, this is actually not what was sold to me, or this is not what I want to continue participating in.
Emma Hayward 14:16
Oh, that’s a really good question. Trying to figure out where to start. Yeah, so there’s a funny quote in my friend group that my friend Nolan said one time, this is back to like a day boat. We were sailing, it was a sunset sail.
Emma Hayward 14:29
He and I were working on the boat together and it was like August, it was late in the season, everybody’s burned out and fried. And this woman is out there seeing how beautiful it is. And she looks at us and she’s like, gosh, you must love this job.
Emma Hayward 14:43
Like you see the sunset every night and you’re just sailing all day and it must be so great. And Nolan looked at her and said, well, you can’t eat sunsets. Which yeah, we always laugh at like, you can’t eat sunsets, you can’t eat experiences, you need money to be able to sustain this.
Emma Hayward 14:58
As far as your question about being like offshore on a longer trip with when it’s not going how you thought it would. Yeah, that’s a really legitimate concern. When I first started working on ships, when I was a deckhand on this one boat, one of the mates who I really looked up to, she sat down with me one day and was just talking about, if I wanted a future in this career and the thing she told me was that no matter what you’ve signed or agreed to or no matter the circumstance,
Emma Hayward 15:28
if you get on a boat and your gut is telling you that it’s not right, just get off the boat, just walk away. Because yeah, as soon as you drop the dock lines and you head offshore, there’s no, you can’t go back like you’re out there and you’ve just got to roll with the punches.
Emma Hayward 15:44
I’ve been really lucky in that I’ve never really found myself yet in a position that’s bad offshore as far as like people or bad captains or bad leadership. But I think that’s because I try to really do my due diligence.
Emma Hayward 16:00
It’s a small world, boat world. And every time you get a new job, you can typically find someone who has worked either on that boat or with that captain or with that crew, like if you’re on the hiring side, like you can usually find someone who knows the person you’re wondering about or the boat.
Emma Hayward 16:20
So yeah, the reputation of different people and of boats is really important, I would say.
Blake Boles 16:27
What’s the state of the industry with regard to gender? Do you still have to be extra careful or more careful as a woman signing up for certain gigs, especially these longer term out at sea gigs, or is it not something you worry so much about?
Emma Hayward 16:48
Let’s see, it depends again on what side of the industry you’re in. If you’re on one of these, they’re called like sailing school vessels. One of these educational tall ships. I, if it’s not 50, 50, then it’s more women dominated.
Emma Hayward 17:03
I would say there’s a lot of, uh, women and just like not male people on those boats. So that is a pretty, like there’s a lot of, but if you were on yachts, race boats, like a lot of more commercial, huge vessels, it’s completely male dominated still.
Emma Hayward 17:21
Um, it is changing. It’s changed even since I started working in the industry, but yeah, it’s, it’s definitely still, there are definitely still issues. Um, I think any woman sailor you talk to has stories.
Emma Hayward 17:37
Um, something that I kind of really like about the industry is, at least in my experience, it’s a lot of women kind of looking out for other women. And, um, I think maybe in the past when there were even fewer opportunities for women on boats, there was more like competition among women, but now it seems like it’s kind of changed to be more support and pulling each other up and warning each other about situations or people or,
Emma Hayward 18:04
um, so it does seem like it’s improving and that there’s more women doing it and there’s more like cohesion and teamwork among the women doing it.
Blake Boles 18:15
So you’ve highlighted these two different sides of the spectrum, uh, the low paid outdoor education, tall ship type jobs. And then the, the Newport mega yachts, uh, fancy catamarans, that side of, of the spectrum, is it really clear for you that that working on the educational side of things is more meaningful, more purposeful and, and working for ultra wealthy people, either crewing their boats or helping maintain their boats is less purposeful or is it not so black and white?
Emma Hayward 18:51
Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about this because I always spend time thinking about how I’m spending my time. But yeah, working on the more educational stuff, you know, it’s obvious why that’s great and how that’s maybe helpful or giving back or just like doing some good.
Emma Hayward 19:12
It was hard for me to ever get really buy into the whole yacht scene. Because yeah, it’s, while it can be really fun, you’re sailing on these beautiful boats, it’s fun, it’s really hard to believe that you’re making the world a better place by sailing like a millionaire around in their yacht.
Emma Hayward 19:29
I don’t know that that’s helping anything. And then I think I’m someone who’s always trying to like be positive about what I’m doing. So when I was working on those charter boats and head boats and stuff, it can be a grind.
Emma Hayward 19:42
You’re sailing in the same bay for six months. It can be really mentally exhausting. But I kind of came to realize that at least this way, I was exposing these people who would never otherwise have gotten on a sailboat to sailing.
Emma Hayward 19:54
And you know, every so often you’d have this one passenger who would kind of be looking up at the sails and looking back at the helm and like really thinking, you could see the gears turning and you could see them realizing how cool this was that we’re like out here sailing this boat.
Emma Hayward 20:07
It just, every so often you’d get that one passenger who had really impacted and that felt good.
Blake Boles 20:15
And you’ve recently snumbled on to kind of a different kind of job on boats that it sounds like is very meaningful and interesting to you. Can you talk about your Antarctic research position?
Emma Hayward 20:29
Last year, I got tired to work on the, for USAP, United States Antarctic Program, I work on a research vessel down in Antarctica. Yeah, I’m a marine tech onboard, which means that I am facilitating all this science research.
Emma Hayward 20:45
So like, I’m putting all the scientific gear overboard for the scientists. And as I told you before, like, hoping that we get it back, I usually do. But I go down there with all these scientists who have all this data that they want to collect.
Emma Hayward 21:00
And it’s as a marine tech, it’s our job to get the data. So yeah, it’s, this will be my coming up, I’m leaving again in February for a trip. And it’ll be my second season on board. I love it. It’s really, really challenging.
Emma Hayward 21:14
It’s cold. I mean, it’s obviously it’s really extreme conditions, and it’s hard work. But you’re with really great people. And it’s interesting. And yeah, the majority of the research, a lot of it is, you know, centered around climate change.
Emma Hayward 21:30
And so you hope that it’s having an impact. Yeah.
Blake Boles 21:35
Walk me through like day-to-day existence on this research vessel. Like, what are your actual responsibilities? When do you sleep? When do you eat? Do you get to hang out with scientists or is it a more lonely affair?
Emma Hayward 21:49
Uh, yeah, so the research vessel I work on is about 300 feet long. Um, depending how many people are on board depends on just the trip that we’re doing, but it’s usually probably around 40 people on board.
Emma Hayward 22:01
Um, you work 12 hours on 12 hours off. So, uh, last winter, the pretty typical shift will be like noon to midnight, midnight to noon. Um, yeah, you are spending a lot of time hanging out with the scientists, hanging out with the rest of the crew on board.
Emma Hayward 22:20
Um, I spend most, well, depending on the work we’re doing, I spend most of my time out on the back deck, um, deploying scientific gear, coming into the workshop to warm up when it gets too cold. Um, yeah, and then I’ll go into the lab and hang out with the scientists and see what they’re learning from the samples we’ve collected them.
Blake Boles 22:41
Okay, that sounds pretty sweet. Sign me up. I want to now go back a bit. We’ve been talking about what you’re doing right now. But I want to find out the early steps. And I know that you had a bit of a dirtbag phase of traveling around, waitressing, taking low paid jobs in weird places.
Blake Boles 23:03
And, and I know that there’s a number of steps that brought you to being a captain to having your own boat to embracing this lifestyle. So maybe bring us back maybe even to when you finished high school, what was happening at that moment in your life?
Blake Boles 23:18
And what were the big events that launched you in this direction?
Emma Hayward 23:24
So I graduated high school in June of 2012. At the time, my dad was planning to retire like the following winter. And so I decided I wanted to take a gap year before going to college. My parents were totally supportive of it so long as I got into college and accepted and like did all the financial aid, got all the ducks in a row and then deferred the acceptance for a year.
Emma Hayward 23:49
Cause they knew that once I was out traveling, there was no way I was gonna like buckle down and apply to colleges. So my senior year, I got all that stuff arranged. My dad meanwhile had bought a small boat on the West coast and he had sailed it out to Hawaii.
Emma Hayward 24:05
So when I graduated high school, I flew out to Hawaii and met up with him. It was a 32 foot wooden boat. She had no engine. And the plan was that we were gonna sail the boat from Hawaii to San Diego.
Emma Hayward 24:22
And then eventually that year, we were gonna go to the South Pacific and sail on this boat together, was the plan. So anyway, so I flew out to Hawaii after high school and he and I got on this boat and we sailed it back to San Diego.
Emma Hayward 24:38
It was my first time, I guess I’d been offshore as like a small child and stuff I’d gone on trips with my dad but it was like my first real time offshore sailing. A trip like that on that size boat at that time of year typically takes anywhere from, I guess like 21 to 27 days but it took us 40 days and it’s a really long time to be offshore.
Emma Hayward 25:02
We went like 39 days without seeing land. Yeah.
Blake Boles 25:08
Was that a problem with like food and water? Like as a nonboat person, I’m a little befuddled.
Emma Hayward 25:16
Yeah. So, uh, what ended, what had happened was that there’s a high pressure system that moves around the Pacific and the North Pacific. And we, we just kept getting caught in this high pressure system in the center of a system of high pressure.
Emma Hayward 25:28
You know, there’s no wind or anything. It’s really calm. And so we would sail for like 24, 36 hours and think like, all right, this is it. We’re going. And then the wind would just die and we would bob around in the middle of the ocean for like four days.
Emma Hayward 25:40
And then the whole cycle would repeat. Um, we had enough food. You bring a lot of, you’ve like a, we had a propane stove on board. We had enough food. Um, a lot of canned food. We had enough water and we had enough propane.
Emma Hayward 25:56
I definitely, I, as someone who has just no experience at the time had no experience. I got really nervous about water. Um, but we had enough and my, my, my dad was never, well, he didn’t show me if he was concerned about it.
Emma Hayward 26:09
Um, we did start getting low on propane, which made me really nervous because, uh, we had a lot of canned food and my dad loves those disgusting canned Vienna sausage things. Um, and I was really worried we were going to run out of propane and I wouldn’t be able to like cook food anymore.
Emma Hayward 26:27
And I would have to just eat the cold Vienna sausage.
Blake Boles 26:32
What a nightmare scenario, you’re out there slowly dehydrating, eating cold Vienna sausage. What a way to go at age 18.
Emma Hayward 26:42
Yeah, but so yeah, it was a I mean, my dad has been sailing his entire life. And that was the longest he’d been offshore. Like 40 days is a really long time offshore. It was just the two of us. We read a lot of books and we played a lot of backgammon.
Emma Hayward 26:56
I don’t think I won a single game. He beat me every time. Played a lot of cards. And yeah, by the time we got into San Diego. Yeah, I think he thought that it was going to kind of kill any love of sailing for me.
Emma Hayward 27:13
He thought I’d never want to go offshore again, but it did just the opposite. I was completely hooked.
Blake Boles 27:18
I want to just press pause here and highlight how earlier you said you can’t imagine having like a normal office job and, you know, this repetitive life. You like to have newness and novelty. And then a lot of sailing experiences or even the Newport doing the day trip with the group’s experience does sound highly repetitive.
Blake Boles 27:41
And what you just said, sitting out there playing, getting your butt beaten by your dad with backgammon, you know, staring at the open sea while there’s no wind for days and days. That’s extremely repetitive.
Blake Boles 27:54
How do you process this asymmetry, the novelty seeking, but then also dealing with a lot of repetitiveness in the world that you’ve chosen?
Emma Hayward 28:09
Yeah, as I was saying it, I was like hearing myself say it and realizing how ridiculous it is. I mean, that’s kind of the famous thing about offshore sailing is that it is just a lot of people find it so, so, so boring because it really is, you know, you wake up and you’re like, okay, what’s the weather?
Emma Hayward 28:25
What’s for lunch? Like that’s all that matters. You don’t have internet or phone servers or anything like that. And so you’re just like your whole world becomes the size of your boat. So if you’re on a, you know, 20 foot boat, your entire world is a 28 foot boat.
Emma Hayward 28:39
Yeah, I don’t know why to my brain that type of monotony just works for me. I think it’s because when you’re doing a trip like that, your your whole goal is just to get from point A to point B, like to move the boat from point A to point B.
Emma Hayward 28:56
And so while it can be really, really frustrating and really challenging and scary and so many things, it’s it just feels like time well spent. I guess it’s really not because you get there and there’s no like parade for you.
Emma Hayward 29:09
Like it’s just. But yeah, I mean, it’s. Perhaps it’s like any outdoor pursuit where it’s like, you know, you’re not gaining anything, I guess, by climbing a mountain. You’re not really gaining much by sailing across an ocean, but yeah.
Blake Boles 29:29
I’m thinking more of the day-to-day moment-to-moment experience, even within a 24-hour period. Like climbing a mountain, I know that I’m not gaining anything materially, but I get to go through the low parts and then go the uphill and get to the top and have the view, then come back down and see everything from the different perspective.
Blake Boles 29:47
And I think this is something I personally struggle with. If I imagine spending a lot of time on the open ocean, it’s just like water next day. Maybe the weather is different, maybe the lighting is different, but it’s water, water, water.
Blake Boles 30:02
And for me, that feels like a different kind of cage. I’m just talking about myself here, Emma, not trying to deride your chosen lifestyle, but I just want to try to understand the psychology. Yeah, if you have any other insight on this, you can offer it.
Blake Boles 30:21
Otherwise, we can go back to your young adulthood story.
Emma Hayward 30:24
No, I do. Uh, it’s, it’s yeah. So, uh, back before I did that first trip from Hawaii, I remember, um, I remember talking to my mom who also had a whole career as a, as a sailor and spent a lot of time offshore.
Emma Hayward 30:37
And she looked at me and she told me, okay, if you have anything that you need to like work out in your brain, you’re going to do it on this trip, whether you want to or not. Like, and I had no idea what she was talking about at the time.
Emma Hayward 30:48
I don’t know. I was 18. Like I just, you know, she wasn’t going to say anything to me that I was 18. I didn’t believe her, but then I got out there and yeah, you’re sitting, I mean, yeah, 40 days with just your dad on a tiny boat is a long time.
Emma Hayward 31:03
And it’s one thing when you’re, uh, sailing and making progress and like, you know, putting in miles every day. But when you’re caught in a high pressure system like that and have no engine, so you’re just bobbing around, it is, there’s no, like, there’s no end date.
Emma Hayward 31:20
You’re not like, Oh, I know that I’m going to get in on this date. There’s no, there’s no light at the end of the top. You don’t know when you’re going to get there. And, um, so yeah, your brain kind of opens up these things that you’ve maybe been forcing down by the distractions of regular life on land that now you’re kind of just forced to sit with cause you’re sitting on watch for four hours and like,
Emma Hayward 31:43
you know, um, so it’s really funny that you bring that up. I think that’s not maybe something that a lot of people who don’t sail think about, but yeah, it’s, uh, um, I think for me when I’m, when I’m out sailing offshore, everything becomes really, really simple.
Emma Hayward 32:01
Like I just, I guess cause the day to day is so simple and then you start getting inside your head and you’re like, Oh, I know what I need to do in my life. Like, as soon as I get back to shore, I’m going to do this, this, and this.
Emma Hayward 32:10
And then it’s all going to make sense. It’s all going to be perfect. Um, and every time when I get back to shore, it’s immediately clouded again and it is never as simple as it seems from out at sea.
Blake Boles 32:22
Well, now that you put it that way, I can see the appeal. It’s meditative, potentially, yeah, personal processing time. And if that is combined with not having cell phone service or having super slow Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi you can only access every now and then, then that really is this sort of digital detox kind of thing that a lot of people say that they’re seeking, but in everyday life, it’s very hard to actually achieve that.
Blake Boles 32:51
Does that feel accurate?
Emma Hayward 32:54
Yeah. And I will say it is changing. Like for me, that is why I love sailing offshore on small boats is because there is no internet, there is no cell phone service. This is all changing now with like Starlink and whatnot.
Emma Hayward 33:09
And so now I guess, assuming you have a certain amount of money, you can afford to have internet on your boat, which to me, like I try not to be a Luddite or anything. Like I really don’t want Wi-Fi on my boat.
Emma Hayward 33:22
Like the whole reason I’m going out there is to disconnect. I don’t want to go out, sail across an ocean and like check Instagram every few hours. That is just like why even leave? Just stay at home.
Emma Hayward 33:32
Maybe in like a few decades, I will hear myself saying this and think it’s ridiculous because maybe at that point it’ll just be so ubiquitous on all boats. But yeah, so yes, yes.
Blake Boles 33:44
So we heard about your 40 days from Hawaii to San Diego, and then you had plans with your dad to continue sailing to the South Pacific. What happened next?
Emma Hayward 33:58
So let’s see, my stepmom got sick and they had a really hard time diagnosing what was wrong with her. And so my dad didn’t want to take off, take off without like with, you know, her health so up in the air.
Emma Hayward 34:12
So the plans to sell the South Pacific kind of got bagged and I was now had a year ahead of me before I could go to college, kind of just to figure out like what to do with it. So I went back to my hometown and was waitressing.
Emma Hayward 34:29
And as soon as I saved up enough money, I kind of just like, literally, I think I like spun a globe and put my finger down and ended up picking Thailand. So I went to Thailand. And then when I kind of ran out of money, I came back home and waitressed again and then had some money saved up and went to New Zealand and then ran out of money and came home and worked again.
Emma Hayward 34:52
So I was doing that for a little bit of time when I was in New Zealand, I decided that I didn’t want to go to school in the fall and I was going to take another semester off. So I emailed the college and requested to defer for another semester.
Emma Hayward 35:07
And then I emailed my parents afterwards and told them that I was thinking about doing it, not that I’d done it yet. And they immediately were like, don’t do that. You’re going to lose all your scholarships.
Emma Hayward 35:16
You’re going to lose everything. Like, do not do this. But it was too late. I already had, and the school got back to me and they did not care at all. It made no impact. It was fine. So I did another like half a year off and I started school in January.
Blake Boles 35:30
All right, lesson to everyone out there who’s 18 and thinking about taking multiple gap years, just go for it. Yes. Um, okay. So then you actually started university a little bit later than expected. And, uh, was your boat obsession able to be, um, stoked when you were in university?
Emma Hayward 35:54
So in that last like fall semester before starting, I’d gone sailing again with my dad on a different boat. And we had sailed down to the Caribbean. So then I started in January, just like more stoked than ever on sailing.
Emma Hayward 36:09
Let’s see. Yeah, I oh, yes. I did a semester abroad with Sea Education Association. That’s the organization that my parents had both worked for and that my dad had just retired from the year before. So as part of his, I think he’d worked there close to 40 years and as part of his benefits, he got a free semester for someone.
Emma Hayward 36:31
So my parents had told me ahead of time that as part of my college, I had to do the semester through SEA because I needed, they needed the free semester, but I really, really wanted to do it. I was so excited.
Emma Hayward 36:42
So yeah, SEA is a program, it takes college students offshore on a big tall ship for a semester. And they do science at sea under sail. It’s really, really cool. It’s exposes, it’s a lot of people’s kind of first exposure to sailing.
Emma Hayward 36:57
So I did that in college. My trip on SEA was a transatlantic. So we went from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean and then through the Caribbean. And I just absolutely loved it. For me, it felt like, I mean, that is the organization where my parents met and my parents worked and then my dad worked forever.
Emma Hayward 37:18
And so if to me, it felt like it was like the culmination of everything was like, now I get to do my own trip on SEA. It was great.
Blake Boles 37:27
What did you study?
Emma Hayward 37:29
I was an environmental studies major. I chose that one because it was, like I thought, I was interested, I felt like an important issue to study and it also I thought would keep me from having to work in an office, which so far I’ve been right about.
Blake Boles 37:45
Keep it up. And what was your next move after college?
Emma Hayward 37:51
Um, let’s see. So I graduated and my boyfriend at the time was a big snowboarder and we both grew up on the East coast, but he really had wanted to move out West. Go live in a ski town. Um, I didn’t really have any plans.
Emma Hayward 38:04
So I moved out to Montana with him for winter and, uh, yeah, I worked like a bunch of random odd jobs and I was not a skier really beforehand. I think I’d gotten skiing like maybe five times before that.
Emma Hayward 38:17
Um, but he was working on the mountain. And so he was there all the time. And so I just like started skiing whenever I wasn’t working. And yeah, it was so much fun. Um, but I was only out there for winter because I knew I wanted to work on boats.
Emma Hayward 38:32
So the, like that spring summer, um, moved to Newport and started working on boats here.
Blake Boles 38:39
Okay, so that kind of connects us to more of your modern era. I want to find out how you go from the dirtbag, low income status on boats into essentially where you are now, Emma, because you’ve told me that you’re able to work something like three to four months out of the year intensively, but that is enough to fund the rest of your year and you are accumulating savings at the same time. Is that correct?
Emma Hayward 39:14
Yeah, well, yes, so I guess when I first moved to Newport, I was working summers on these boats and then in the winter. So I would take other boat jobs elsewhere down south, usually in the Caribbean.
Emma Hayward 39:26
I did that for years. I spent a winter working in Bermuda on a boat, just places like that. And you can start to acquire some savings that way, but not much. You’re living off very little because you’re living on the boats.
Emma Hayward 39:40
Yeah, it’s very dirt baggy. Another term for it that people say in the boat industry is if you’re a schooner bum, that’s part of it too. It’s like a dirt bag on boats. Schooner bum, OK.
Blake Boles 39:52
That’s what happens.
Emma Hayward 39:53
Um, so yeah, I was doing that for years. Um, it’s great because to get licensing in boats, you have to acquire a sea time. And so you need like a certain amount of days at sea. Um, so you, it becomes kind of easier to work for less money because you need the time to apply for the licenses.
Emma Hayward 40:13
It’s a, yeah, that’s how the system works. So, um, while it’s like kind of hard to work for work really hard for not a lot of money, you know, that you’re getting time towards your license and it can turn into like bigger license, potentially a better job and making money.
Emma Hayward 40:27
Um, so I was doing that for a long time. And then the, the Antarctica job was something that was always on my radar. I had heard these stories of people working on boats who had then gotten hired to work as a Marine tech in the Antarctic program, but it was like completely, it felt so beyond my reach.
Emma Hayward 40:45
Um, I would like click around on the internet and look for applications, but it’s, it’s a, you’re working essentially for a government contractor. And so it just like seemed, it was really hard to without like a foot in the door.
Emma Hayward 40:57
It was really hard to ever figure out how to even apply for the job. Um, and then yeah, at one point I just got a text from a shipmate, a friend who I’d sailed with a lot, uh, saying that she knew the woman who was doing hiring for the position and I want her number.
Emma Hayward 41:10
And I took it and I just sent my resume out and she got back to me. And so, uh, yeah, I was really, really excited. Um, you definitely, yeah, this program feels like the most like, like grown up or like adult, like career boat job that I’ve had, um, because it comes with things like, you know, you could have like health insurance and like a 401k, like all these crazy things that seemed so unattainable in other parts of the boat world.
Emma Hayward 41:40
Um, so this job, it like has really been kind of a turning point for me as far as both it, um, yeah.
Blake Boles 41:51
Has it made your life feel more sustainable? Like you can look down the road and think, I can keep doing this for quite a while longer if I want to, instead of maybe wondering every year if it’s gonna end very soon.
Emma Hayward 42:06
Definitely. It’s what made my sailing on my own boat possible. My boat needed like, you know, just so many projects to make it seaworthy and sailable and all that money. Like I went and worked my first winter in Antarctica and came home with a whole bunch of money and proceeded to just like pour almost all of it into my boat.
Emma Hayward 42:27
So yeah, it made that all possible. It’s kind of yeah, sustainable, definitely. And I think, you know, now just because in the last year or so, I poured so much money into the boat, savings are really small right now.
Emma Hayward 42:45
But the plan is that is to continue working this job in Antarctica and sailing my own boat and slowly each year, hopefully having to put less and less money into huge projects on the boat and just squirreling away more and more money.
Emma Hayward 42:57
And yeah, this will hopefully be a sustainable thing.
Blake Boles 43:03
What are some big outstanding questions or concerns about living this way? In which ways do you still worry that this might be an unsustainable way to live?
Emma Hayward 43:15
Um, there’s a couple things that come to mind when you ask that. The first is that I have a partner, um, who is, he’s not a boat person. Um, when we grew up together, so we’ve always known each other.
Emma Hayward 43:29
And so, you know, when we started dating, we, we both knew that like, I leave for long periods of time and go sailing and have this really kind of random. Schedule of a life and he doesn’t. And we were like, okay, well, we’re just going to make it work.
Emma Hayward 43:43
And so far we have, um, but it’s definitely when I think like long-term sustainability, yeah, it’s, it’s really hard to make this lifestyle work with someone who isn’t also doing it. Um, I think we do a really good job of it and it’s something that we’re like constantly checking in with each other about, but you know, when you’re out at sea on a boat, it’s so all consuming and you’re just like, as I said before,
Emma Hayward 44:05
your whole world is the boat. So it, yeah, it’s hard to then like come home and you have kind of like the culture shock of being back on land and then like trying to share these stories and stuff with him can seem kind of overwhelming.
Emma Hayward 44:19
Um, but at the same time, we both also really like kind of having time to ourselves and then to come back and get to like catch up on everything is really special. Um, so yeah, that’s one thing I think about with the sustainability of this lifestyle.
Emma Hayward 44:30
Um, and then the other is just, yeah, uh, you know, I’m 39 and so people are getting married and settling down and starting these like lives and it’s, it can be hard to feel like I don’t want the same things that all of my friends want.
Emma Hayward 44:48
Um, which is not to say that I’ll never want, you know, a house and kids and stuff, but I just don’t feel those, you know, I don’t want those things right now. Um, so I think in the past year or so, something that’s really been on my mind is trying to figure out just the social balance of all of this and how I can, um, yeah, like maintain meaningful relationships with people I love and still go traveling for most of the year.
Blake Boles 45:18
Can you please share what you’ve learned or hypothesized in that department? That’s a great question.
Emma Hayward 45:25
Oh, I, I guess I’ve been trying to make, so like right now I, I, I have this, these handful of months where I’m not sailing my boat and I’m not working and just like here home in Newport with my partner and I just, um, and a whole group of friends.
Emma Hayward 45:41
And so I guess I just really think about, uh, like quality time with them. Um, yeah, I try to like make time to go have dinner with people or like go on a walk or just any little thing. If I’m thinking of someone, I call them up, like just really trying to be there for all these friends when I am there.
Emma Hayward 46:04
Um, my sister, she lives back on Cape Cod and she has two young kids now and I’ve like, I’m really trying hard to be a part of their life. Um, I definitely haven’t figured it all out yet, but yeah, it’s a huge, I don’t want to like be this lone wolf and not have anyone.
Emma Hayward 46:21
The only reason that I can do any of this is because I have these supportive people in my life. Um, without that, I think this would all be a lot less fun and enjoyable and meaningful. Um, so it’s just trying to figure out, yeah, when I come home, how do I make the most of the time I have at home?
Emma Hayward 46:35
I just try to be really present and yeah, put in effort to spend quality time with people I care about.
Blake Boles 46:42
And when you are at home, like you are right now, do you really have like broad swaths of free time, uh, do you have obligations or work stuff that you need to be doing, or, or is it real, um, you know, when you’re working, you’re working, when you’re not, you’re really off, are you really able to enjoy a number of months of free, flexible time right now?
Emma Hayward 47:05
Yeah, so I think that it will get better and better as I save more. Right now, I’ve picked up some little part-time jobs just because I’m trying not to deplete the savings, but as I work more, it’ll be fine.
Emma Hayward 47:22
But yeah, I have a lot of free time. It’s great. I spent the whole summer sailing on my boat, not working, just cruising and sailing. So that was a huge chunk of free time that I got to spend exactly how I wanted to spend it.
Emma Hayward 47:41
And it was wonderful. I can’t imagine like putting a price tag on any of that. And yeah, now being home here, it is really nice. I’m kind of settling into just like the day-to-day slow life. It’s been kind of hard for me to like, it’s hard for me sometimes to work without a plan or a schedule to just exist, but I think it is a good skill to learn.
Emma Hayward 48:05
I’ve been writing a lot. Yeah.
Blake Boles 48:08
So you seem to manage your free time pretty well because I know that other people struggle with being in a place where everyone else has a more normal job and normal schedule and is maybe just available on weekends and evenings.
Blake Boles 48:21
And then you have all this time during the day. And if you don’t have many other people to spend that time with, it can feel, it can feel a bit oppressive to have that amount of free time, but you seem to find plenty of ways to occupy yourself.
Blake Boles 48:36
And like you said, you do have some part-time gigs to keep a little bit of cash coming in.
Emma Hayward 48:43
Yeah, no, it definitely it can be challenging and it um I guess I just Yeah, it’s hard for me to not have a schedule I feel like i’m more productive what I have a lot to do than i’m better with my time, but I am Yeah, as I said, just kind of getting used to it.
Emma Hayward 48:58
I’m trying to spend time I love to write and i’m trying to be really disciplined and like spend time writing and Go for runs and like just spend time with people. Um, and I think as I continue down this This lifestyle it’ll get easier and easier to kind of Yeah, just kind of exist in my downtime
Blake Boles 49:18
Hmm. I’m curious about your recent trip from Newport to Ireland where you took a few friends along and this was just a personal trip for kicks, is that right?
Emma Hayward 49:31
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s kind of like, was the dream. I’ve always wanted to have my own boat and sail on air. And I got to do that this, you know, after working for over a year fixing up this boat. Yeah, I left Newport in June with two friends.
Emma Hayward 49:53
One of them someone who I knew through working on boats, and then one of them a friend from growing up who had no experience on boats whatsoever. So we left from Newport, we sailed to the Azores, which are it’s called like a halfway point, but they’re closer to Europe.
Emma Hayward 50:12
And we sailed to the Azores, we’re about 19 days from Newport to the Azores. And we spent about three weeks kind of cruising around to different islands there. And then then the non boat friend, she was great on board.
Emma Hayward 50:27
She was great on the trip, I would go sailing with her again anytime. But when we were in the Azores, she sat me down one day, and she was like, I cannot possibly go offshore again. That was not for me.
Emma Hayward 50:37
I, I don’t want to leave you in a tough spot. But I really don’t want to sail on to Ireland. And yeah, I said, that’s like, I was really impressed to her for knowing when she’d had enough. That’s not something that I always am capable of knowing.
Emma Hayward 50:53
So yeah, she, she left us and then the two of us sailed on to Ireland. Just the two of us took us about 12 days to get there. But yeah, it was great. Like, it was great.
Blake Boles 51:06
Can you tell me about any specific moments during that trip? I mean, this sounds like, like you said, a trip of a lifetime, bringing a few friends and sailing across the Atlantic, tooling around in the Azores as a pit stop.
Blake Boles 51:19
Are there any moments that really stand out to you? You know, it could be beautiful moments, challenging moments, or like, this is why I’m here, this is why I’m doing this kind of moments.
Emma Hayward 51:29
Well, let’s see. I mean, there’s a handful, I guess, one that felt really good. So I’ve done a lot after sailing. I’ve sailed transatlantic a couple of times before this, but I had never done it as like captain or on a boat that I had done all the work on myself.
Emma Hayward 51:46
So it was a lot of pressure. I really didn’t want to get anyone like killed or in a bad situation just because I had this done dream. You know, I didn’t want anyone to get, I just wanted to get everyone there safely.
Emma Hayward 51:59
So there was a lot of stress, but I will say when I got into the Azores, we were clearing customs and the customs agents will like come to the boat because you’re not supposed to get off until you’ve cleared and they were like, well, you know, who’s the owner?
Emma Hayward 52:14
Who’s the captain? And it was just really cool to be like, that’s me, like me and it felt really good. That was a moment that just, yeah, it was coming and seeing the Azores. Yeah, getting in that was like so great.
Emma Hayward 52:30
And that was the first, that first night in port, I slept so much, which was so nice. I like hadn’t, you know, you’re just, you’re not really sleeping much when you’re offshore. So that was great. On the trip to, from the Azores to Ireland, we knew going into it that that part was going to be, it’s shorter distance wise, but it’s like way more challenging weather wise, which we knew.
Emma Hayward 52:56
But like it was a really, that was one of the, in all my years of sailing, that was one of the most challenging trips I’ve done, that jumped from Azores to Ireland. It was really high winds. It was really big rolling seas and it was foggy.
Emma Hayward 53:11
Fog personally to me is like my least favorite thing out at sea. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It is so terrifying to be in really thick fog and it lasted for over a week, which to the point where we were coming into Ireland and we were in such deep fog, we couldn’t see land and we knew there were huge like container ships all around us.
Emma Hayward 53:30
We could see them on our AIS, but we couldn’t actually see them. It’s really nerve wracking. But so I was, I was pretty beat down by the time we got into Ireland. But when we got into port, like I remember, like we got in, we tied up the boat and it was just like such an incredible feeling of like, oh my gosh, I’ve wanted this for so long and I did it.
Emma Hayward 53:53
And it was so hard, but we did it. And yeah, it was suddenly all very worth it.
Blake Boles 54:00
Fantastic. And that sounds harrowing to be among container ships in a thick fog. That’s no way to go. So do you have any other big trips coming up? You, you already said you’re going to be back on the Antarctic research vessel, but anything else of the, of the scale of Newport to Ireland or, um, yeah, what do you dream of in the future, whether it’s sailing related or not?
Emma Hayward 54:26
Um, so looking ahead, yeah, in February I go back to the research vessel and I’ll be on that until, uh, late April. And then, yeah, the plan for this summer is to go over. I hauled the boat out and I left her, um, in, um, in Cork.
Emma Hayward 54:42
And so the plan is to get the relauncher in the spring. And, um, I would want to sail around Ireland and Scotland. Um, the Outer Hebrides are a group of islands that I’ve always, always wanted to sail to.
Emma Hayward 54:57
Um, and so, yeah, hopefully making it there this summer and then over to Scotland. Um, I’ll leave the boat there in the fall, haul her out, get her all tucked in for winter and then come back to Newport and, uh, yeah, just do it all again.
Emma Hayward 55:12
The plan is to kind of just keep doing this as long as I can and sail, um, as far as I can on my boat.
Blake Boles 55:20
just hopping from Antarctica to New England to the UK or wherever else the boat happens to be and doing it all over again. That sounds like a pretty great way to spend a number of years, Emma.
Emma Hayward 55:33
Yeah, I agree. It’s not super warm, but it’s good otherwise.
Blake Boles 55:38
If there is anyone who wants to follow your travels, your adventures, do you have a public way for people to access that?
Emma Hayward 55:47
Um, I would say the best way is my Instagram. Um, I’m not like super consistent about posting, but when I do post pictures and stuff, it’s there, um, it’s at Emma Story Hayward.
Blake Boles 56:00
Great, and I’ll put a link in the show notes. Emma, thanks so much for coming on Dirtbag Rich.
Emma Hayward 56:06
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.